A majority of diseases arise within luminal organs such as the gastrointestinal tract and coronary arteries. Understanding and diagnosis of these diseases can require knowledge of their gross and microscopic structure, as well as their composition and molecular and cellular expression.
An optical imaging catheter has become an important tool to assess and diagnose diseases arising from luminal organs. This is the case, since many of the mechanisms involving diseases occur on a microscopic scale, high-resolution imaging techniques can be very important. Thus, optical imaging techniques, which are also considered to be relatively safe and non-toxic, are can be used for in vivo imaging. Optical frequency domain imaging (OFDI) or optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging using rotationally scanning catheters can be used for studying cross-sectional and three-dimensional microstructure of luminal tissues. However, information such as molecular expression and tissue composition may not be ascertained from the OFDI signal. Other independently developed catheter-based imaging modalities, such as Raman spectroscopy, fluorescence imaging, near-infrared fluorescence (NIRF), time-resolved lifetime spectroscopy (TRLIFS), and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can provide this additional information. However, these exemplary techniques operate without knowledge of the underlying microscopic structure, making it difficult to place the acquired signatures in the appropriate morphologic context.
In order to resolve such possible issues and advance catheter-based diagnosis, it is therefore possible to obtain OFDI images in combination with data from these complementary modalities. Multimodality imaging techniques have been developed for cellular imaging under a microscope or small animal imaging due to relatively easy accessibility. However, in vivo multimodality imaging of luminal organs, such as coronary arteries, gastrointestinal tract, and respiratory system has not been appropriately described. Although multimodality imaging techniques in a catheter form have been utilized, such techniques could not provide comprehensive three-dimensional (3D) information from the luminal organs yet, due to the lack of fast rotation, high speed acquisition, and/or small catheter for in vivo data collection.
A sequential acquisition of such diverse information using multiple independent catheters and systems has, however, likely been untenable due to the impracticality of conducting multiple procedures, subject motion, and difficulties registering datasets. Thus, there may be a need to provide combined multimodality OFDI catheters and systems which can facilitate, e.g., a simultaneous acquisition of co-registered OFDI and complementary structural, compositional, and/or molecular data. In addition, it may be beneficial to address and/or overcome at least some of the deficiencies of the prior approaches, procedures and/or systems that have been described herein above.